chris erdman

From my journals, Tuesday, November 6, 2007

I am again humiliated. It’s not so much my sins I see but my poverty of love. I enter my heart but find it full of pride, anger, fear, resentment. Where is my Love, my Lord Jesus, who promises to dwell there? Was he ever there? He has vanished? Or, has Love gone deeper in, leading me on, deeper, deeper, past my ego’s many layers?

So what am I to do?

Lament my sins?  The obstacles?  God’s elusiveness?  My ego’s expansiveness)?

There’s nothing to be won by this—only the spiral into real despair.

No, instead, love still more. Follow the passion of your heart. Love leads you on; your heart must find the Beloved . . . and only Love can guide you along this twisting path. The saints testify that Love is the only true guide. You can trust them; they’ve been down this path and found what you seek.

Here’s important testimony from a reader who has lived through severe depression and offers some important advice regarding the use of medication.  Depression sufferers and their supporters, please listen to this!  (A response to my recent post: Light on Severe Depression.)

As a pastor who was hospitalized with clinical depression and anxiety and stress syndromes, I can add my personal AMEN to what you have shared, Chris.

The church certainly remains behind the eight ball on this one. In my congregation’s case (at the time), they carried out a better model. They teamed with my presbytery (regional governing body) to create a team to take care of both me and the congregaton’s ministry (liaison with the session [governing board]). The session granted me a three-month, paid leave of absence.

I had the grace, space and time to rest and get well, under the care of an excellent Christian psychotherapist and a quality psychiatrist, who found just the right medication.

Speaking of the latter–STAY WITH YOUR MEDS TO THE END OF THE REFILLS, my friends.

Thinking you’re better just because the symptoms go away is a BAD REASON to stop your meds without careful consultation with your physician(s). You’ll just dig a whole that ends up being harder to climb out of than before.

And depression sufferers: IT DOES GET BETTER. Indeed, it often takes a lot of time, hard work, and trial and error–but you’ll find God in the midst. That’s a promise fulfilled in my case!

A year ago yesterday, I lost one of my dearest friends.  I’ve written and spoken publicly a lot about mental illness, suicide, and the need for us to become more open and understanding of those who struggle with mental illness and, in particular, severe depression.

Here are several links to some of what I’ve said in my effort to mainstream an all too common silent struggle that isolates the sufferers and their families, and open the doors for us to live more compassionately in ways that foster healing and hope.

One out of every 10 Americans will experience clinical depression during their lifetime.  Dark emotion will become chronic and debilitating, affecting their ability to function, interact with others, and derive pleasure from life.   One out of every four women will be clinically depressed at some point in her life. Because of our increasingly complex and interrelated world, clinical depression has become a modern epidemic.

Says Parker Palmer: “People walk around saying, ‘I don’t understand why so-and-so committed suicide.’ Well, I understand perfectly why people take their lives. They need the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting. It’s why, day by day for months at a time, I wanted to take my life. What I don’t understand is why some people come through on the other side and reclaim life with new vividness and with new intensity. That is the real mystery to me.”

Here is the original post just days after Jamie Evan’s death.  It contains links to audio sermons.

And here is a link to a written manuscript of the sermon and a post entitled, God and Suicide: A Personal Encounter.

In addition here’s one more link to an audio sermon from summer 2010, “When Depression Seizes You.”

Depression is real, common, and treatable.

Contrary to the way it makes us fee, and what we may have been taught, it doesn’t disqualify any of us.

Please join me in standing alongside those who suffer in silence and loneliness.  Pass these on to friends and family members.

Here’s a lovely 106 year old witness to the love of beauty. It’s a testimony to the power of the spirit to overcome enormous trauma and suffering through the love and practice of beauty. I can’t help wondering how things around us would change if we lived as such ordinary saints, simply celebrating and cultivating beauty each day in the little places where we live.

Here’s a link to an audio of the sermon I preached on Sunday, June 20, 2010.

Some background . . .

One out of every 10 Americans will experience clinical depression during their lifetime.  Dark emotion will become chronic and debilitating, affecting their ability to function, interact with others, and derive pleasure from life.   One out of every four women will be clinically depressed at some point in her life. Because of our increasingly complex and interrelated world, clinical depression has become a modern epidemic.

Says Parker Palmer: “People walk around saying, ‘I don’t understand why so-and-so committed suicide.’ Well, I understand perfectly why people take their lives. They need the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting. It’s why, day by day for months at a time, I wanted to take my life. What I don’t understand is why some people come through on the other side and reclaim life with new vividness and with new intensity. That is the real mystery to me.”

Depression is real, common, and treatable. Contrary to the way it makes us fee, it doesn’t disqualify us.

In this audio sermon, I explore the nature and experience of depression through the life of one of Israel’s greatest prophets, Elijah.  With Elijah, we listen for the negative messages that play in our heads tumbling us into despair, we watch for the presence of those angels who nudge us and tell us to do such things as “get up and eat,” and we walk the long journey into the dark cave that can become a womb of rebirth into human community.

I’m risking some TMI (too much information) here. I do so to show the deep struggle that is the life of earnest prayer—not just praying for things, but the deeper way of prayer leading to the goal of the spiritual life: union with God.

In July of 2009, I was wrestling with the pain and humiliation of a failed marriage and wondering what it all meant, how I could continue on.

“What is this school you’ve got me in, Lord?”

And God said: “You once prayed, ‘Teach me to love, till I love Love above all, till I am Love.’ This school’s is an answer to your prayer.”

“Yes, I remember, but I didn’t think learning to love would require this. I guess I thought love would be enjoyable.”

“Love will cost you everything.”

“Then I didn’t mean it.”

“You didn’t know then what learning to love would mean. Who does? But I mean for you to learn it. Do you think this was only your idea?”

“Then I’m tired of it. I’m hurt, broken, pretty much a failure. I guess I’m tired of You too. You make things pretty tough.”

“And sometimes I’m tired of you. You make things pretty tough. But this doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it. It’s your attachments that make it feel like this learning-to-love is killing you. That part of you must die. Unless it does, you’ll never live in Love. This isn’t the end of you; it’s the beginning. So stop resisting, and let Me take these lesser things from you. They are not the true you anyway.”

Here’s a revolutionary spiritual practice that can bring you into the present and can change your experience of this moment:

With only a very few exceptions, welcome whatever you face in this present moment as if you’d asked God for it specifically.

You spend a lot of time dwelling on what you want instead of what is. You waste a lot of good energy fighting your way through this present moment, because it’s not what you thought you’d signed up for or what you think God should have given you. You dream of a better job, a better body, a better friend or spouse or child or boss. And you’re in essence praying for deliverance from this moment. But what if you’re praying against the present God’s given you? What difference would it make today, right now, if you yielded and embraced this moment—even its pain—as a gift from God?

Of course there must be exceptions. No one should accept as gift the cruel things humans can do to each other. Those are more rare than you may think. While you may suffered great cruelty at a moment the past, you’re not facing it at this very moment. The pain was real, but right now it’s a pain that can only live in you with the permission of your memory. Let it go. It’s hurt you too long.

Come into this moment.

Be.

Here. Now.

Breathe.

Let God kiss you.

Many around the world have listened to the MP3 of a raw sermon I preaching three days after my friend’s suicide. I wrote about it here on this blog with links to the audio sermon (the second, or 11am service, was more raw and pointed than the first). I’ve since edited the audio sermon (strictly oral sermons don’t make for very good written ones, so it needed some work).

I’m posting this for all who seek some spiritual perspective on the trauma and tragedy of suicide, and strategies for helping others and themselves through an honest and open encounter of mental illness—so necessary in our society today.  I hope you’ll pass it around . . . for the good of us all.

Download the written sermon here: God and Suicide: A Personal Encounter

Usually, I feel a sense of accomplishment when I come to the end of a book.  I close the book and put it back on the shelf and feel no compulsion to reread it.  But once in a blue moon, I come the end of a book and grieve reading the last few sentences.  I’ll never again get to read the book for the first time.

In 2006, I felt that way with Will Dalyrimple’s, From the Holy Mountain.  This morning, I read the final word, “Selah,” in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, paused, and wept.

The Red Tent is a deeply moving retelling of the biblical story of Jacob’s kin, told from the vantage point of the women.  It’s a tale of rare beauty, terrible brutality, and of suffering redeemed.

After these grueling years of my own suffering, I find my journey reframed by this ancient tale freshly retold.  After brokenness and loss and death, a new wholeness is coming.  After her own long, hard road of suffering, Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob says, ”The painful things seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place.”

I like that.  Pain made beautiful.  Somehow—both a gift of God and the fruit of our own dogged determination to put one foot in front of the other.  Pain is not forgotten or trivialized.  Rather, there comes a point when you begin to realize that your knotty pain is keeping the beads of an exquisite beauty in place.  You awaken to realize that even death has lost its cruel sting.

Suffering and death, no longer enemies, become “the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art.  Of all life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.”

Suffering winnows and refines until only love remains.  If it does that—if we allow it to do that—death will lose its sting.  And suffering becomes our teacher.

Solomon once said that “love is strong as death.”  He was wrong.  It’s stronger.  For love alone is immortal—and so are we, when our suffering’s stripped us of every lesser thing.

A reader commented on my recent post, Suffering doesn’t mean tolerating abuse.  What she says is very important, and adds urgency to what I’ve said before.

I really appreciate the awareness you’re been fostering concerning mental illness, especially depression. It’s something that is highly stigmatized and misunderstood, and too often dismissed in church communities. I would like to bring up another mental illness that is also misunderstood, dismissed, and often not even believed to exist: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD).

Your description of an abuse victim suffering from an internal abuser after the external abuse has stopped is, I believe, a classic description of PTSD. And though I don’t think you were at all trying to imply in your post that abuse is something one should just be able to “get over”, and I agree that the process of getting out of one’s thoughts can be helpful in the healing process.  But I think that a sufferer of PTSD usually needs a lot more.

Too often in our culture communities tend to deny the abuse itself, as well as the fallout—the reality of the symptoms of PTSD, which are the normal human response to trauma. The further tragedy is that PTSD is highly treatable with a number of therapeutic approaches, but most abuse victims don’t get the treatment they need, either because they don’t know about it or because it’s really expensive.

The big thing I would like to stress is that the symptoms of PTSD, including the feelings you describe in your post, are not the result of any kind of failing on the part of the victim, and that to imply that they are does further damage to the sufferer.

I don’t think you’re implying this, but a reader who suffers from PTSD might misunderstand you—since one of the symptoms often related to PTSD is the way the sufferer feels responsible for and guilty of the things that one suffers, even though that’s not the case.  And given the pervasiveness of abuse in our culture (statistically more American women have been raped than hold college degrees), it’s probable that you have quite a number of PTSD sufferers among your readers.

Again, I greatly appreciate your engaging in discussion of mental illness. It’s terribly important and necessary, and we can’t have healing in our society without such discussion.

For an excellent treatment of the relationship between spiritual practices like meditation and emotional distress like PTSD see this brief article by Dr.Robert Scaer.